Birthday

Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

Author, essayist

Recipient, the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1929

Born to a writing family (several siblings and children enjoyed distinguished careers), Mann published nearly sixty works over a 56-year career. His works are imaginative and intellectual, considering the seductions and corruptions of life, the human struggle for love, and the conflicts of human nature’s expression with social norms. Buddenbrooks (1901) chronicles a successful commercial family not unlike his own, among whose members the callings of Art render them unfit for life; The Magic Mountain involves a man facing- and embracing death, who then finds renewed reason for life. Death In Venice (1912), tells the story of a man who literally dies of attraction to a beautiful youth he cannot possess. Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43), a four volume series, considers the Biblical story at length.

Mann enjoyed a happy marriage and six children, though inner struggles with his sexuality pervade his works. He emerged from the ruins of World War I a German nationalist, though the upheavals of the 1920s led his thinking to a more democratic cast. He became an outspoken critic of the Nazi Party, and when Hitler became chancellor in 1933, was advised not to return to Germany. Mann settled in Switzerland; his German citizenship was revoked in 1936; the University of Bonn withdrew the doctorate awarded him in 1919.

In 1939 the Mann family emigrated to the United States, where he recorded monthly anti-Nazi broadcasts for the BBC; he became an American citizen in 1944. Mann returned to Switzerland after the war (Bonn returned his degree in 1949), but, while he made frequent visits to Germany in the last years of his life, he refused to live there.

Many of Mann’s work remain in print to this day.